Cirque du Soleil

Las Vegas: Behind The Scenes Of An Insane Circus

But clowns notwithstanding, the technical wizardry of O, combined with the unbelievable athleticism of the performers, is mind-blowing. This sort of stuff is hard enough to do onstage, but it’s unfathomable underwater. My preconceptions about Cirque’s artsy-frothy frivolity were erased. Underneath the clown makeup, the precision is watch-like. The technical inventiveness is insane. I needed to know more.

So when Zarkana, a Cirque show that originally premiered at New York City’s Radio City Music Hall, landed in Las Vegas to begin a 10-year-residency at the Aria, it offered a rare opportunity for a look behind the scenes.

Zarkana is a traditional Cirque show, with a focus on acrobatics and, yes, clownery. (Much of the latter, by the way, I still have trouble dealing with.) But the show does have a throwback feel — director François Girard described it to me by saying, “It’s like a big cartoon. A big cartoon with acrobats.”

Don’t ask me what the story is — something to do with a wizard and a weird eight-armed fetus thing. But the stunts are spectacular. The show begins with what I’d describe as “reverse juggling,” as a female performer bounces half a dozen balls off the floor and various stage props. It moves on to a nerve-rattling highwire act, in which a pair of wire walkers jump on each other’s shoulders, among other things. Having just chatted with them earlier in the day, I was truly terrified for them, especially when one seemed to stumble.

There’s also some wild acrobatics, including a scene in which a guy stands on the upper rung of a ladder (just your everyday ladder, without supports — he was keeping it up strictly with balance) while a woman stood, on one foot, on his head. Watching the trapeze act left me with no option but to bite my nails. And I can’t not mention what they call the “Wheel of Death,” a rotating figure-eight-shaped device inside and outside of which two extremely brave gentlemen run, jump and skip rope.

When the show ended, I had questions, so many questions. Most were variations on the theme of “How the hell did you do that?” What happens backstage while technical miracles are unfolding onstage? Do people just nervously stand around, waiting for their turn to go on?

What’s fundamentally startling is that everything I saw really happened. This is key to the Cirque’s appeal, in particular, maybe, to guys. When you go see TheAvengers or The Dark Knight Rises or whatever big-budget Hollywood epic is playing at your local multiplex these days, a certain sense of wonder is missing. Because everyone knows the answer to the “How the hell did you do that?” question is “computers.” When you watch a Cirque show, you know that the lady standing on the guy’s head, the guy jumping rope on a giant spinning figure eight and the guy sitting on another guy’s shoulder on a tightrope are real. That’s a huge part of the thrill.

When I spoke to show director Girard, the first thing I wanted to know was how they managed to coordinate 75 performers, many of whom are onstage at the same time and many of whom are strapped into or on top of a complex system of rigging.

“There’s so much we’re hiding,” he says. Take the (sigh) clowns, who only appear about five times onstage during the show’s 90 minutes. “If you were to walk with them through the entire show, you’d find that they never have more than a minute to breathe. They have to get off the stage, change costumes, put on a new harness, climb back up again, meet again under the stage, come up through the trap door, do their thing and then run somewhere else. And that is true for every artist.”

To keep track of this staggering complexity, Girard and company came up with a clever solution: “We worked out a flow chart where we track what every artist is doing throughout the show — even before we start working. A trapezist is performing for this amount of time, needs this much time to warm up, this much time to cool down, etc., and I’m trying to use all of the rest of the time the artist is in the house to maximize the human impact to the audience.”